5 Micro Eating Habits You Can Easily Do For A Greener Planet

It will also be beneficial to your wealth, health, and well-being.

Food is the fuel of your body and brain. With your eating habits, you can influence your health, well-being, and productivity. You can also save money and reduce your carbon footprint.

Most people believe eating healthy is expensive, and they have to implement radical changes into their lives to be more sustainable.

I have a flexitarian diet, which means I only occasionally eat meat. I’ve spent around $200 on food per month for more than three years now and continue to look for ways to enhance my health and do less harm to the planet.

Here’s how healthy, cheap, tasty, and sustainable nutrients can go hand-in-hand.

1. Don’t throw away food

Most people overlook the first habit. Many tend to forget about what they bought, and with a heavy heart, they throw away food.

While this micro habit seems obvious, even people who are short on money frequently waste groceries. In the USA only, more than one-third of the food ends in the trash. Every single year.

It’s like everybody in America is throwing around 650 croissants right into the trash. Or more than 650 middle-sized apples.

Most of us live in societies free of the threat of famine. To respect the food and the processes behind its production is the least we can do. You can start by paying a little more attention.

To stop throwing away food, follow these steps:

• Observe what you have at home. Write down the name of the items you usually don’t eat but still take up space in your fridge or shelves. Consume or give them away before they expire and avoid purchasing them again.
• Stop impulse buying. Make a shopping list and stick to it.
• Instead of one big weekend purchase, go to the shop multiple times. If you don’t have the time, plan out exactly what you need for the week, and don’t buy more. People usually over-purchase. Buy only what you really need.
• Store your food appropriately. Most people don’t know how to store fruits and vegetables, which too often leads to rotten produce. Don’t refrigerate potatoes, tomatoes, garlic, cucumbers, and onions. Bananas, avocados, tomatoes, cantaloupes, peaches, pears, and green onions, among others, make other groceries go off faster.
• Organize your fridge, so all foods are visible. Out-of-your-sight foods might end in the trash. As the saying goes, “out of sight, out of mind.”

2. Implement vegetarian meals into your diet

Vegetarian dishes are healthy, cheap, and good for the environment. Even if you’re a meat-lover, implementing only a few vegetarian dishes into your diet changes a lot. You don’t have to skip meat altogether.

To have a cold-cuts-free breakfast, try out banana pancakes, oatmeal, cereal, plant-based yogurt with fruits, toasts with cream cheese, honey, marmalade, or guacamole. All of these are vegetarian and ready to eat in 10 minutes.

For vegetarian lunches and dinners, go for zucchini cheese balls, a salad with grilled cheese, noodles with pesto, fried tofu with sweet-sour sauce, or mushroom stew. Regarding the tofu recipe, I googled: tofu the way my boyfriend will love it. He never liked tofu, but he enjoyed this recipe. Even tofu can be tasty!

If you don’t like my favorite dishes, all you have to do is google ‘easy vegan/vegetarian dishes under 30 minutes.’

If you don’t want to cut out meat from your diet, you can still experiment with plant-based alternatives. Even my meat-loving friends were over the moon when I showed them how tasty a vegan hamburger is.

“…(companies) have replicated the burger experience without having to sacrifice the taste of the burger. So now a lot of consumers feel like they have a healthier option, they are reducing the amount of meat they consume, and they just feel better about that,” said Darren Seifer to the New York Times.

Vegan meat alternatives provide the same nutritional benefits as beef patties with fewer disadvantages. They are rich in protein but contain fewer saturated fats. If you choose the plant-based variant, you decrease your chances of heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and type 2 diabetes, among other health issues.

It’s also a huge favor for the planet, as plant-based meat production emits 30% to 90% less greenhouse gas than the conventional industry.

3. Shop local fruits and vegetables

Have you ever thought local products could be cheaper than imported ones? Head to the marketplace, my dear.

When it comes to fruits and vegetables, you can get tons of products for free or at an insanely low discount price. Here’s why:

At the marketplace, vendors throw away good-quality food daily. I know because I regularly go there to tell them I’ll bring home the goods they’d otherwise throw away. So, I always had fruits and vegetables in my kitchen for free. This trick is part of how I spared more than $10,000 in my university years.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t judge marketplace vendors. They can’t sell fruits and vegetables that don’t look perfect, and it’s not their fault. Our society learned to expect everything to be super fresh and impeccable. Most people can’t understand how a small, bad-looking carrot could have the same value as a big, shiny one.

Yet, not-so-handsome vegetables mean there’s more diversity and less unnatural modification. They also contain the same nutrients and are healthier.

I grew up in the countryside, with a big garden. My family produced fruits and vegetables and sold them at the farmers’ market. The thing with bioproducts is they can’t look perfect, and some do lose quality quickly. We always picked strawberries, for example, the day before selling. The tasty red berries usually start to spoil after a couple of days.

The fruits you buy from exotic countries were picked unripe and are full of pesticides. Otherwise, they wouldn’t survive, and they’d look ugly.

Besides the price and health factors, local products help the environment as those weren’t transported through half of the world just to land in your digestive system. That means less emission through transportation.

4. Try plant-based milk

Almond milk is my new habit. I switched to plant-based milk four weeks ago, and while it tastes different and is slightly more expensive, I’m glad I did.

The health benefits of plant-based milk compared to cow milk are straightforward:

• It’s rich in vitamins and minerals
• Most plant-based milk is low in fat
• It doesn’t contain any cholesterol

There’s also a wide range of tasty alternatives you can try out: almond, soy, rice, coconut, or hazelnut milk, among others.

Studies prove plant-based milk is significantly better for the planet than dairy milk in terms of emissions, land use, and water need.

5. Use ToGoodToGo or similar apps

Besides households, many other players waste food. Restaurants, hotels, stores, bakeries, and vendors at the marketplace throw away an insane amount of food every day.

I experienced this first-hand during my time as a waitress. Hotels throw away every surplus item—tons of untouched, high-quality food land in the trash over and over again.

For heaven’s sake, that food isn’t bad. It isn’t fresh either, but it’s still good to consume.

Wouldn’t it be nice to take home what’s left at the end of the day for an insanely low price?

The good news is, someone is already making it possible.

A genius start-up is working hard to solve our food-waste issue. TooGoodToGo offers products ranging from lunch to groceries, with at least a 70% price reduction. They conquered the European market and entered the USA last year.

All you have to do is download their app and check what restaurants are part of the program near you. Choose what to pick, and at the end of the day, you can collect good quality food that would otherwise end up in the trash.

I wrote about the company thoroughly here. This is no advertisement; I’m genuinely convinced about TooGoodToGo’s mission.

Multiple other companies fight food waste too. Find the one in your neighborhood, and save both food and money.

Conclusion

Sustainability doesn’t have to suck.

You don’t have to give up everything in your life and transform yourself into a zero-waste social warrior. You shouldn’t make your life miserable to reduce your carbon footprint either.

When it comes to fighting climate change, we have a collective issue, but we can’t solve it radically. At least not yet. So let’s create solutions that equally benefit our personal growth and the planet. The go-to mentality is to implement simple, reasonable, and maintainable habits into our lives for the long run.

Here’s what to remember to reduce waste:

• Don’t throw away food from your fridge
• Introduce vegetarian days into your diet
• Shop local
• Try out plant-based milk
• Save food from restaurants with ToGoodToGo or other apps

Let’s make sustainability fun together for a livable planet.

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